Sunday, 18 January 2015

Miss Understanding – Expect the Worst!

Brian Mendonça

One of the takeaways for me
of pk is that it revolves around a
misunderstanding. The girl (Jagat Janani aka Jaggu) thinks she is stood up by
the boy (Sarfraz) on her wedding day. To
cut back to the chase, Jaggu (Anushka Sharma) arrives at the church to be
married (this is, after all, Bruges in Belgium) and seats herself among the
pews waiting for her fiancée. While she is waiting she observes another lady
who has also come there to be wedded. When this other lady is asked by the
pastor about her partner, she rushes out of the church looking for him -- in
the process leaving her kitten with Jaggu. A young boy enters the church,
searching for someone. He sees Jaggu dressed in bridal gown holding the kitten and
gives her a letter. The letter (unsigned) is presumably from Sarfraz saying he
cannot go through with the ritual – and she is not to contact him in future.
Jaggu in a state of turmoil rushes out of the church – but leaves the letter in
the pew – and returns to Delhi.

The audience is all
teary-eyed that a blossoming relationship between Jaggu and Sarfaraz (read
India and Pakistan) has sundered on the rocks.
Rajkumar Hirani, the director picks up the pieces almost 2 hours later
in the final scene on the talk show where pk
(Aamir Khan) is pitted against Tapasvi Maharaj - the Godman. He asks Jaggu, who is now the anchor of a T.V.
show, a simple question, ‘Are you sure the letter was for you?’ pk then unravels what actually happened.
The letter was intended for the other girl. Sarfraz did come to church that
day. He does not find Jaggu, but finds the letter. Assuming it is for him he
thinks Jaggu has written it for him and returns crestfallen to Lahore.

This is a case of double
misunderstanding. What pk drives home
is the point that we tend to believe what
we want to believe – not what is necessarily true. Negativity often gains
the upper hand as our mind is already coloured by the anxiety of a worst-case
scenario. In the case above neither Jaggu nor Sarfraz gave the other the
benefit of a doubt. Though both pined for each other, none made any attempt to
contact each other. It needed an alien to bring that about because as Shaw said
commonsense is not very common.

We
all have dreams to nurture. We need to stand by ourselves – and others -- and believe
these dreams will happen; not cave in to accidents of chance which erode our
conviction. In pk, both ‘Miss’ Jaggu and ‘Mr.’ Sarfaraz misunderstand the
situation. As Rajeev Dhavan writes, ‘PK is not a person but an idea that
interrogates, even scolds us . . . it
asks us to re-examine who we are.’The next
time when something goes wrong, before we leap to conclusions, let’s probe why
things went wrong. Expect the best in life.